Secret of Kells notes
The Architextures of the Book
Arhcitectural drawings all over the inside of the twoer where the Abot is; like the slate drawings Brandon does. The book when complete becomes animated and exteriorized, exploded. First we see close ups of animated figures on pages moving, hten freezing into place. Then het Chi-ro page (only the middle page) is shown ina a sort of 3 D way as it also becomes unreadable and comes apart, fade to white.
Earlier, when Brnadon goes to get the eye of Cromkell, he manages to contain the snake / monster by circling him ina lfat perspective even htough he seems to be floating himself in 3d space. The drawing s abstract (the animated snake) but also mimetic (a snake) and looks like the design of the chi-ro page, at least partially. The eye as a a magnifying glass, a splitting of vision as well.
It’s a second eye.
What Brandon draws is also a circular shape (another eye)
Book Bildung in watch the map of spaces—the flat perspective overheads of the wall and tower where Brandon lives nad the tower and walls where Aslyng lives as well as the circlluar geometrical shapes htat float. The book cover also has a shape. But it is not fixed.And it doesn’t fix htemss pages. Thebook is not about being rad but about being looked at.
Opening sequence—Brandon falls from the scaffold—canot navigate arhictecture builing; and then he falls fromt eh Oak tree in the forest after getting hteink materials. So he is just as inept at navaigating naturalshapes.
Nature often looks abstract. The treses are all the same height in the forest, etc.
Brandon as a visionary
His visons are preceded and o/ followed by geometrical designs circilingaround his head.
In the scriptoriu, Brandonhas a vision of invading viikings that ends with sequence we saw at the end of the opening with Birohter Aidean escaping frm the Island, only now mo re fleshed out—just before Aidan arrived—he has to take the blueprints to The Aabbot.
Barndon as artist and film anaimator—draws on his slate at night—breaks it and draws another—his drawings become animated. Iwhen he tries to draw on the book in his nightmare, it becomes animated, like the growth at the place Ashylingwsaved him from.
His slate is like th eblueprints of the Abbot. Shows him moving htrough the wall—when he does leave, we see moving thorugh exactly that wall from that [perspectve
One broter splashes ink on the page another has inscribed.
Aidan’s shaodow becomes a bunch of Vikings as heis explaining to Brandon why he will have to finish the Book of Kells.
Another Viking invasion just happens is=na seris of scenes—first n the mist with a guy standing with a bell; he is eventually thrown agains ta wallby the talking Viking (hwho sounds like Darth Vadar).
The most important page is blank; the ye that will enable to draw it is lost too. Aidan dropped it and druched it with his own foot (Don’t Look Now.
Book of Kells as flip book, movie projector
When Brandon first told about the book, we see it flip, then a devil flies up and is blinded, and the words bang bang show briefly.
Materials of book—book to pebble inscriptorium, to nature, to faery, to collection, to in
Ashlyng brings another sack of htem. As the pebbeles turn to ink and Aidan draws, a tree grows on the page as a drawing, htenAidan and hten Ashyling run across the page and slide down the tree (more nicely than the FlBradpn took fro the Oak treeor from the scaffold when he was chasing the duck). Then they re in the forest and he draws on his slate and shows it to Ashlyng, then leaves fly past and we are back in the diegetic world.
The answer comes months later, in a long letter that Hantaï dates 28 November-17 December, when under a postscript headed "Retouches," he picks up this and other loose ends: "Book of Kells, like the Saint-Gall lectionary, manuscripts with pictures, stylized ornamentation, Irish, seventh century" ¤
-1."Livre de Kells et etc. sont des points de suspension. Je voulais parler des différences apparues dans cette zone d'indifférence, une fois la préférence, la prédilection, broyée aussi. Je n'arrivais pas à en écrire sans ouvrir une polémique. Expériences avant le choix, sans jugement. Prédilections dénudées. Champs labourés sans fin, pierres et blocs remontant du fond, heurts du soc et les singularités de leur poids et de leur voix."
-1.Book of Kells and etc. are ellipses. I wanted to talk about the differences that appeared in that zone of indifference, once preference, predilection, ground up as well. I couldn't write about it without getting into a polemic. Experiences before choice, without judgement. Predilections stripped naked. Fields ploughed endlessly, stones and boulders coming up from below, ploughshare running into the singularities of their weight and their voices. (15-19 Sept 99; 77)
"Livre de Kells, comme l'évangéliaire de Saint-Gall, manuscrits à peintures, ornementations stylisées, irlandais, VIIe siècle"
The Body of the Letter: Epistolary Acts of Simon Hantaï, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Jacques Derrida
Julie Candler Hayes
The second component of the epistolary machine is the act of reading, interpretation, imbricated within the act of writing. To focus on reading is to bring to light the complexity of the "communication" process, to recall that not all questions are answered, or even understood, that any message encounters scrambling upon entering the zone of associations and responses that constitute the reader. Letters cross in the mail; the disturbances in their delivery alter their messages. Even when the letters arrive in order, their writers may write at cross-purposes, each missing what the other is saying. Connaissance offers not only a "picture of the artist at work," but also any number of other objects in the room, the significance of which varies according to the spectator. Take for example Hantaï's typically elliptical reference, in his letter of 6 September 1999, the letter announcing the "end" of his copying: "Seeing the allure, the illuminating tendency (book of Kells) in Derrida, in bricks of material in you" ¤